Woulda. Coulda.
Shoulda?
EDITORIAL, NYTimes on
the Web, October 4, 2006
The more the House Republican leaders
try to defend themselves on the Congressional page scandal, the worse it looks.
They still do not seem to appreciate how serious this is, especially for a party
that poses as the arbiter of morality. And they appear to be trying harder
to deflect blame from themselves than to get to the bottom of what actually
happened. The F.B.I. has begun investigating, but that will be a prolonged
process, and the voters have to render a verdict in five weeks. There is
evidence emerging that they should consider.
Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, is responsible for the page program, and for
seeing that the recent improprieties are properly investigated. His
performance has been disturbing. As late as Monday, he was still
minimizing the scandal. He said he understood that the improper contacts
between pages and Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned last week,
occurred after the pages left the program. “This was after the fact,” Mr.
Hastert said, “and you know — would have, could have, should have.”
First, it’s not at all clear that events transpired after the pages left the
program. And, in any case, why is that relevant? Surely preying on
ordinary young Americans is just as vile as preying on pages.
Mr. Hastert hardly sounds like an effective leader who intends to investigate
the allegations thoroughly, particularly now that the focus is shifting from Mr.
Foley’s conduct to whether House leaders covered it up. His remarks struck
the same dismissive tone as the White House spokesman Tony Snow’s references to
“naughty e-mails.”
It is disturbingly difficult to straighten out the basics of who said and did
what when. John Boehner, the majority leader, was saying late last week
that he did not recall informing Mr. Hastert that there was a problem with Mr.
Foley. Now he is insisting he did and trying to dump the mess in the
speaker’s lap. Thomas Reynolds, the New York Republican who heads the
National Republican Congressional Committee, insists he told Mr. Hastert this
spring of his concerns about Mr. Foley. But Mr. Hastert says he does not
recall being told.
There are more unanswered questions. When John Shimkus, the Illinois
Republican who is chairman of the House Page Board, learned of the Foley
problem, he informed the House clerk, but not the Democrat on the committee, or
anyone in the Democratic leadership. It is unclear why he withheld the
information. The pages’ well-being should have been his primary concern,
not partisan politics.
Mr. Reynolds, who was one of the few members of Congress to know about the Foley
problem early on, insists he did all he had to when he “took it to my
supervisor,” Mr. Hastert. But Mr. Reynolds is a key member of the House
leadership, and his constituents need to know whether he knew enough to have
done more than he did. We’d also like to know why, in the months when Mr.
Reynolds was one of the few people to know of Mr. Foley’s misconduct, Mr. Foley
contributed $100,000 to Mr. Reynolds’s Congressional campaign committee.
Every one of these political leaders is up for re-election next month.
Voters should go into the booth with full information about how they all handled
this challenge to their leadership.
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